Tax Lien Investing: How I Got Started

Nine years ago my husband and I sold our 2 bedroom condo thinking that we were going to rent for a while until we were able to find a three bedroom home for our growing family (we had three young boys). We were unable to find a place to rent or buy in the county that we lived in. We moved almost an hour away to a small 2 bedroom apartment in the town that I grew up in. The housing market was just starting to take off and for the next 4 years we looked for a home that we could afford in three different counties in NJ and were unsuccessful.

Because we couldn’t find a house to buy that we wanted to live in, we decided that we would look into purchasing real estate for an investment. The problem was that rents had not rose at the same rate as selling prices of houses, so if you had to purchase an investment property and get financing, the rent that you collected would not be able to cover the mortgage payments. Still I thought that real estate investing was the fastest way to build wealth. So I thought that we should try buying foreclosed houses or pre-foreclosures.

The real estate market was booming at this time and investors were paying close to market price for foreclosures because the market was rising so fast. At the foreclosure sales that I went to, small distressed houses sold for over $300,000, and that was out of my price range. Also at these sales you needed to have 20% of the bid price in certified funds on the day of the sale and the rest within 10 days. Since we found ourselves locked out of the real estate market, I wanted to do something with the little bit of money that we had left from the sale of our condominium to invest for our future. I had heard about tax lien investing, and I thought that was something that I might be able to do.

I started going to tax sales in NJ, the state that I lived in at the time. The problem was that I could not find any information about how to invest in tax liens in my state. At that time there was just one book in print about tax lien investing and it didn’t contain any specific information about my state. What information that I could find was very general. So I started going to tax sales and doing some research to find out more. I met someone else that was trying to do the same thing I was, only on a much larger scale, so we teamed up and helped each other.

We learned the tax lien investing business in NJ, and for a while I worked for my partner, building a sizable tax lien portfolio for him while I was building a smaller portfolio for myself. I hired a handful of people to help me and trained them on how to do due diligence for tax sale properties and bid at the sale. We even developed our own software to track our investments and automate a lot of the work.

Meanwhile I realized that there were a lot of people out there like me who wanted to learn about tax lien investing, but didn’t know where to turn. I started my web site, TaxLienLady.com, to answer questions about how to get started investing in tax liens. I researched tax lien and tax deed investing in every state and wrote a couple of e-books, which I sold through my web site. Then I started doing teleseminars, and interviewing experts in different states on aspects of tax lien and tax deed investing. I wrote step-by-step home study courses on tax lien and tax deed investing, and began doing live seminars for local investing groups.

Now I have multiple home study courses, web sites, and blogs for tax lien and tax deed investing. I have a tax lien investing podcast on iTunes, Videos on YouTube, and articles on tax lien and tax deed investing that appear all over the internet. My goal through all these mediums is to give you the truth about tax lien investing, without the hype, and to help you build your own profitable portfolio of tax liens or tax deeds. If you’d like to find out more about how you can get started investing in real estate secured tax lien certificates, or buying properties for pennies on the dollar with tax deeds, you can get my free report “7 Steps to Building Your Profitable Tax Lien Portfolio” at www.TaxLienInvestingBasics.com.